A Sense of Direction: Pilgrimage for the Restless and the HopefulGideon Lewis-Kraus352 Pages, HardcoverRiverhead, 2012www.penguingroup.com

Gideon Lewis-Kraus grew up in New Jersey, of course, and has lived in San Francisco, Berlin, and Shanghai; for the moment he’s in New York. He has written for Harper’s, the New York Times Magazine, the London Review of Books, n+1, McSweeney’s, and other publications. A Sense of Direction: Pilgrimage for the Restless and the Hopeful is his first book.

In the Photo Booth with...

Gideon Lewis-Kraus

Gideon Lewis-Kraus’s first book, A Sense of Direction: Pilgrimage for the Restless and the Hopeful, is the story of three pilgrimages he made – from the famous Camino de Compostela in Spain, to a 900-mile solo journey around the Japanese island of Shikoku, to the Hasidic pilgrimage site of Uman, Ukraine.Gideon is still traveling these days, but we managed to pin him down and ask him a few questions about his pilgrimages – and why he doesn't need to be a pilgrim anymore.

Interview by Elvia Wilk

You traveled to three pilgrimage destinations designed for religious purposes, but you weren’t pursuing religious absolution. Without a specific religious goal, were the destinations completely arbitrary?

The question for me, though I think I only dimly understood this when I set out, was how I could give myself a way to remain in suspension. The whole question of arrival, for a secular modern pilgrimage, is a completely arbitrary one; arrival just represents the place where you can’t keep moving. The creation of an arbitrary goal – of, say, Santiago de Compostela – is actually just the frame for being suspended in motion. Or, rather, it’s a kind of suspension that’s masquerading as motion. That first journey became a completely formal exercise, though my ideas of form and content were subsequently complicated. We told ourselves we had no expectations about what the end might bring.

The Camino de Santiago is an orchestrated, touristic experience, but in Japan you were in a foreign, rural place with very little pilgrimage infrastructure. Being confronted with this contrast led you to break down the distinctions between tourism and pilgrimage. How do you differentiate between the two?

Other people I met along the way were concerned with being “authentic” pilgrims in different ways; I got caught up in that, too, at first – a big part of any pilgrim’s self-image is that he or she isn’t a tourist. But authenticity doesn’t exist in the abstract; it only has meaning in terms of the aims of the experience. It might mean being true to some idea of the original experience’s religiosity – going to pilgrims’ masses and so forth. But, absent of religious belief, most pilgrims come to think of it in terms of just playing by the rules, which is to say it has mostly to do with whether you walked the whole way or let yourself take the bus. My favorite pilgrims didn’t worry about stuff like this too much; by the end of the book, most of these distinctions have broken down.

Unlike a religious story, your story doesn’t have a dramatic resolution. How did you deal with the lack of a climactic conclusion to your real-life experience?

I had this fear, which was of course also a wish, that the only possible resolution of a book about restlessness and commitment was the Eat Pray Love example, but I was lucky enough that no Javier Bardem character appeared, and then the book was finished. The end of the book becomes, in part, about how rarely we get any real sense of closure, or rather that closure often comes in the counterintuitive form of a new openness. If there was a dramatic result, it was beginning anew with my dad. There could be a whole epilogue – probably a whole second book, though I won’t write it – about his reaction to it. The absolution in the end wasn’t divine but personal.

One thing that impressed me about your book is how accurately it describes the Berlin experience for young people. You capture a feeling that’s in the air here, the restlessness, the reasons people come to the city, and the reasons they leave. Was it living in Berlin that made a pilgrimage necessary?

I have no idea, really. I suspect the idea of the Camino would have appealed to me either way, but the Berlin context definitely gave a special allure to the idea of spending a month getting up early every morning and knowing that the day ahead held nothing in the way of decisions. If Berlin is a kind of holiday from obligations, the Camino held out a lot of promise as a holiday from decisions.